It turns out however that a key piece needed by the OpenBSD community was missing -- the docs for the Fire I2C controller. The Fire controller, I soon found out was based on Mentor Graphics' MI2CV IP core, technology that Sun didn't own. We contacted Mentor about making the documentation publicly available but were politely turned down.

Persistence Pays off

Luckily Marco Riera at Sun decided that he would keep trying different avenues at Mentor. Every couple of months he would send me an email saying, "I haven't given up yet."

I admired his tenacity but felt he was tilting at windmills. Needless to say I was very surprised when six months later he told me that Mentor would allow us to post a subset of their user manual that covers all the relevant info a coder would need. The OpenBSD guys were psyched and Theo de Raadt asked for Marco and the people at Mentor's names so he could personally thank them.

Marco thanks for your persistence and Mentor thanks for allowing us to post your information. This Bud is for both of you!